On June 13, 323 BCE, Alexander III died in Babylon. He had wanted to be buried in Egypt, at the fabled oasis of Siwah, where a great temple to Zeus stood. (Alexander believed that the supreme Greek god, and not the mere mortal Philip of Macedon, was his true father.) Some two years later, as his body was in transit, soldiers loyal to Alexander’s lieutenant Ptolemy stole the corpse—what historian Robin Waterfield, writing in his new book Dividing the Spoils, calls “more or less an act of war.” That war would rage for two generations, reshaping the ancient world in ways that are with us today. Encyclopaedia Britannica contributing editor Gregory McNamee had a conversation with Waterfield, who lives on a small farm in southern Greece, about his book.

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Britannica: By now, a vast library of books has been devoted to the subject of Alexander the Great and the world empire that he forged. What was it that prompted you to add another book to the stacks? Was it a “eureka” moment of realization that previous scholars had been missing something important?

Robin Waterfield: Alexander’s successors fought over his empire for forty years after his death. I wanted to write about this period because it seems to me no less thrilling and no less important than the dozen or so years of Alexander’s zenith, and yet the successors have been totally overshadowed by the conqueror. It wasn’t so much that previous scholars had missed something as that an accessible and accurate book had not yet been written about the successors at all.

The excitement of the period lies in the wars they fought to carve up the empire, all of which are covered in my book. Its importance is that a new world emerged from the haze of battle. First, the successors stabilized the kingdoms they created from Alexander’s spear-won empire: without them, it is not easy to say what might have happened, but the empire may well have descended into chaos. Second, a by-product of their work of stabilization was massive emigration from the Greek cities to new foundations in Asia. Greek culture followed in the successors’ train. It was they who created the Greek East, which later came to rival the Roman West. It was they, then, who in a sense laid the foundations of the world as we know it today.

Britannica: Was the collapse of Alexander’s empire something that he could have—perhaps even should have—seen coming? Could Alexander have done anything to prevent it?

Robin Waterfield: Alexander could have done a great deal to prevent it—had he lived! The question “What would Alexander have done had he lived?” is, of course, ultimately unanswerable. But if he had set in place an administrative and bureaucratic structure suitable for running such a vast empire, then the empire might have survived and flourished without the successors’ work of consolidation.

But that’s a big “if.” At the time of his death, Alexander seems to have concerned himself little with administration, beyond the bare minimum necessary for an ongoing conqueror to secure his rear. And in the months leading up to his death, he had prepared what have come to be known as his “Last Plans.” The most significant of these planned future projects involved further conquest on a vast scale. Having taken over the East, Alexander wanted to move into the western Mediterranean as well. He wanted to subdue the wealthy merchant city of Carthage, and then Sicily and Spain and southern Italy too. He wanted to create a pan-Mediterranean empire. But it’s hard to see how all this further conquest would have helped to stabilize what he already had.

For instance, the most easterly of the provinces were notoriously unstable, constantly seeking independence. If Alexander was fighting thousands of miles to the west, what steps would he have taken to stabilize the east? As I say, an unanswerable question …

Robin Waterfield, author of "Dividing the Spoils"

Britannica: Had the Alexandrian empire not disintegrated so thoroughly, could the Greeks have prevented Rome from the stunning and swift conquest you describe?

Robin Waterfield: I think its division by the successors into separate kingdoms actually ensured the longevity of what has come to be called the “Hellenistic world.” Be that as it may, you have asked an enormous question. As a one-word answer, I would say no. I don’t think the Greeks could have done anything to stop the Roman conquest. But the reasons for this lie not so much in anything Alexander or his successors may or may not have done, as in the very nature of society in the Greek world.

Four empires or kingdoms had emerged within fifty years of Alexander’s death: the Ptolemies had Egypt; the Seleucids (descendants of Seleucus) had much of Asia; the Antigonids (descendants of Antigonus the One-Eyed) held Macedon; and the Attalids held Pergamum. But the ethos of these kingdoms, and of the kings themselves, was incredibly aggressive. Royal status was gained by war and maintained by war. In a never-ending, bloody cycle, military success brought wealth (from plunder and indemnities) and increased territory, which enabled a king to create more revenue, to pay for more troops, and hence to gain more military successes. That was the royal ideology, and that was why the kings always clashed with one another. Essentially, what the Romans did, for roughly 150 years from the beginning of the second century BC, was exploit this rivalry between the various eastern superpowers.

Britannica: Given current heated discussions about the role of China in the modern world economy, I was interested to read of the commercial warfare that Antigonus waged against his rival Ptolemy in Egypt, keeping access to timber away from him and thus thwarting his ability to construct a navy. Was this an innovation on Antigonus’s part? That is, do we have other instances of this use, as you call it, of “economics as a form of warfare” from the ancient world?

Robin Waterfield: Very many examples come to mind, but it’s important to stress that they are often scholarly reconstructions. As historians of the ancient world, we are, naturally, dependent on our sources, and above all we look to the narrative accounts we have of the period as a whole. But the fact is that ancient historians only rarely glanced more than superficially at economic factors. They were writing political history—events, battles, and especially the influence of individuals on events. They were little concerned with other engines of warfare such as economics and technology.

So let’s take a famous example: the disastrous Athenian invasion of Sicily in 415 BC, during the Peloponnesian War. What attracted the Athenians to Sicily were the island’s riches, especially grain, ship-quality timber, and minerals. They were in desperate need of all these commodities. Yet we hear not a word about this motive in Thucydides, or any other historian of the event. But here’s an example where the facts need no scholarly reconstruction: in the middle of the second century BC, the Romans removed the commercial island of Delos from the control of the merchant city of Rhodes, precisely to deny the Rhodians the very valuable harbor dues.

Britannica: What lessons are there for our own time about Alexander’s empire and its dissolution?

Robin Waterfield: My primary intention was just to write a good history book, without drawing any such parallels. The difficulty with such parallels is that there are always as many differences as well, so that it’s impossible to say that the same result would obtain today as in ancient times. But if pushed, I would say that some aspects of my period do contain lessons for our time. Perhaps the most important is this: If a power emerges that clearly has imperialistic designs, then sooner or later a group of lesser powers will band together to bring that empire down. Antigonus the One-Eyed was well on the way to becoming a second Alexander—but the other successors ganged up against him, brought him down, and carved up his empire. A unipolar situation (where there is only one superpower in the world) is extremely unstable in this way, and history has shown time and time again that unipolarity gives way to multipolarity. That may not happen overnight—factors such as the aggressiveness of the would-be imperialist determine how quickly opposition arises—but it does invariably happen.